by J. S. Brent
I don’t know how long we lay there together, after it was over. I might have spent several hours listening to the sound of his breathing, the beating of his heart, and the soft plink of a water droplet falling to the ground every 12 seconds. His chest rose and fell. When I knew for certain that he was asleep, I slipped my t-shirt back on and slipped out of the cave’s mouth into the bright moonlight.
I felt slightly sick to my stomach from the sheer number of emotions I had been forced to experience in the last day or so: fear, suspicion of a friend, the hollow ache of regret, the humiliation of thinking I was going to die, first at the hands of a man I had trusted, and then in a cave fighting a bear. The resolution of that last event had somewhat compensated for what came before, but now that the afterglow was fading I felt anxious about the future.
I had grown up knowing that just because I slept with a guy didn’t mean we were committed to a relationship. I could have a casual fling, and maybe that’s all this was. The fact that we were in a cave on an island searching for buried treasure certainly seemed to suggest as much. Yet I suspected that for Henry it had been more than that. Yielding myself to him had been a way of signaling that we were together, that from now on we would be inseparable, that only death would come between us. Never mind that I hadn’t necessarily meant to convey that. I still valued my freedom and independence, and sex is not a magically binding contract. I remained free to go where I pleased and to sleep with whomever I wished.
But he wouldn’t see it that way. And having seen what he was like when his anger was aroused, I was afraid to point out the discrepancy in our interpretations of that night’s events. My body was one thing—I had been loved by several men. My heart was another matter.
One thing was clear, though: we were going to have to talk about it sooner or later. I didn’t want Henry operating under some romantic illusion about our relationship. We had slept together; that was it. It didn’t mean anything, or at least (I thought with a sigh, as I turned to go back inside) that was what I told myself.
* * *
Henry was only beginning to stir as I made my way back inside. By the light of the fire I could see him rubbing his tired eyes and groggily fumbling for his clothes. Even with the fire blazing the night was uncharacteristically cool, and a chill wind reverberated through the cave like a dim echo of loneliness.
It was Henry who finally stirred and got us moving again. “Liv, we need to get going,” he said, as he nudged me aside and reached for his shirt in the dim light. “We should have moved hours ago.”
He nodded in the direction of the cave depths.
“But we don’t know what’s in there,” I said, the memory of the attack still fresh in my mind.
He threw me a look as if to say, you seriously think I can’t handle it?
So we walked. With Henry clutching the torchlight, we descended into the cave’s entrails. The darkness overwhelmed, but my fear slowly subsided as we encountered nothing but an endless tunnel forever moving forward in one direction.
How long we walked without encountering anything more significant than a large granite rock in the middle of our path, I don’t know. I confided to Henry that it felt like hours, though I suspect he was able to bear the monotony considerably better than I was because he was accustomed to walking for hours with nothing to distract him but the brisk him of his own thoughts. But by comparison with this abyss, even the dullest part of the island was a visual feast of leaves and trees and swaying branches and woodland creatures and human trash. Here there was nothing, nothing but the two of us and the flicker of torchlight on walls that never narrowed or widened by a single inch.
I remembered seeing movies when I was a girl where a plucky band of adventurers crawled through dark spaces, sometimes on their hands and knees, toward the center of the earth. The notion had always appealed to me (movies like that were one of the reasons I’d become an archeologist), but the reality was something quite different. The smell was rank and I could hardly breathe.
We began the long walk in silence. I was too overcome by the weight of recent events to do much talking, and I presumed the same of Henry. Once or twice he tried to make a joke, just to lighten the mood, but all laughter was immediately swallowed up in the vacuum of that place. The underground world was no place for light conversation or comedic banter. Every attempt at conversation would dissolve, after a few hapless minutes, into another long and discomfiting silence.
After we had gone on in this way for some time, Henry suddenly paused and threw an arm in front of me. I stopped, feeling slightly vexed.
“Do you hear that?” he asked.
For a moment, I didn’t. And then there it was: a persistent, muffled sound as of running water. I peered deep into the tunnel, as though expecting an old man carrying a rain stick to suddenly appear coming towards us in the opposite direction.
“What is it?” I asked, with a disoriented feeling.
“I’m not sure yet,” he said, in a tone of breathless wonder. “But I have a couple of guesses.”
To my surprise, Henry left my side and pressed his head against the left wall of the tunnel. His face scrunched up hard in concentration, he beckoned me to come closer.
“It’s the sound of running water,” he said. “Coming from deep in the earth.”
“You mean, like a giant system of pipes?”
“Yes,” he said happily, “but it’s not manmade. We’ve gone way too far below ground for that. It’s a natural underground river.”
“What does it mean?” I asked.
“It means,” he said, “that we may be approaching a large body of water, an underground pool. I wonder if Granddad ever made it this far.”
I remembered every underground pool in every adventure movie I had ever seen. Suddenly my head was filled with visions of giant mushroom forests, huge prehistoric men, and battles between gargantuan sea-beasts from a world before man.
“If I’m not mistaken,” said Henry, “the river and the tunnel are currently running roughly parallel to each other.”
“But they couldn’t have been for very long,” I said. “We only just now started hearing it.”
“There must have been a bend in the river,” he replied. To test his hypothesis, he walked about 50 feet backwards in the direction from which we had come. I followed, not wanting to take even the slightest risk of getting lost under the earth in all this darkness. Fifty feet back the water still murmured, but not at the same level of intensity we had heard a moment earlier. One hundred yards back, we could barely hear it.
“So at one point the water was flowing perpendicular to us, in this direction, and then it curved and began running parallel,” he said. We continued to move forward, and every few feet he would stop and place his ear once more against the tunnel wall. Now we were able to hear the water wherever we walked, but it remained at the same volume. It was running alongside us.
“Listen!” Henry cried, pulling me along at every stop. “Listen, listen!” I laughed to see him so overjoyed at this new marvel. It helped to take away some of the sting from our fight that morning, from the fear of him, from the anxiety I felt over our sleeping together. I felt my heart warming again after a long freeze. Given my past experiences with boys, I could never have been won over by a single act of love, any more than the water locked away behind that wall would have come bursting out after a single blow with a pickaxe. It was a slow war of attrition in which I ceded more and more ground until the whole was won.
We kept walking. But now the discovery of the water had given us renewed energy. We pressed on with a zeal we hadn’t felt since we left the cave. Certainly the end of our search was just around the next corner or the one after it. It felt like the moment in The Wizard of Oz when the four heroes finally catch sight of the Emerald City.
But we weren’t so fortunate. The tunnel wound on for another hour, the river running alongside it. My stomach rumbled loudly. My lips were parched, and I cursed my lack of foresight in leavin
g my chap stick back at the hotel.
“Henry,” I said quietly. He flinched slightly. After so many hours of silence, the sound of my own voice came as a shock. “Something just occurred to me.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, we’ve been walking for three to four hours, at least…”
“My watch says three and a half,” said Henry.
“Well, it didn’t take us three and a half hours to cross the island. What I’m trying to say is, if we were above ground, and we had been walking for that long…”
“We would be in the ocean by now,” said Henry. “Yes, that had occurred to me, too.”
“Then that means…”
“It means we must be under the ocean,” he said.
“Yes.” I was quiet for another moment, trying to frame my thoughts.
“What’s up?” said Henry, sensing my confusion.
“Well, if we’re under the ocean,” I said, “then how is there an underground river? Shouldn’t it all be water?”
“Not necessarily,” said Henry, pausing to take a break and offering me a long sip from his blue water bottle. I took it gratefully. “We may under the sea, but we’re clearly still under land as well.”
And, to fortify his argument, he reached up and beat against the hard roof of our tunnel with his right hand.
“Which means,” he said, “that the ocean is somewhere above us. But between us and the ocean there’s obviously a thick layer of rock. And my guess is, within that layer of rock there’s a stream of water. Eventually that stream of water will merge with the ocean, but at this point it hasn’t.”
“But if that’s the case, and we keep following the river, then eventually we’ll hit the ocean, too,” I said. I pictured Henry hacking away at a wall of rock until the sea came pouring out and killed both of us.
“We won’t necessarily die,” said Henry, guessing my thoughts. “I can’t prove it yet, but I suspect we’re rapidly—or slowly, depending on your perspective—approaching an underground shore with an inland sea. With the proper equipment, we may even be able to sail across it.”
The necessarily wasn’t exactly reassuring, but the idea that we might get to see an actual inland sea fascinated me. If only my colleagues at the money pit could have known about this. Devin would have been positively red-faced with jealousy!
We walked for another half-hour, but instead of reaching an inland sea we arrived at an intersection where the path split into four distinct tunnels. Remembering how easily explorers had gotten lost in every cavern story I had ever read, I looked to Henry for guidance.
“The lore of the island says the glow worms will guide us,” he said. “I’m guessing one of the tunnels is lined with the little creatures. And they only show themselves at night.”
I drew a deep breath, not looking forward to an entire night in this oppressive place.
Seemingly sensing my discomfort, Henry added, “I suggest we come back tomorrow when we’re better prepared. When I’m all patched up.”
I groaned. “It’s going to take us at least four hours to reach the living world again.”
He nodded sadly. “Yes, but the only alternative is camping out here for the night. And, I don’t know about you but I’m feeling a little claustrophobic.”
“Same,” I replied.
We turned and left the cave the way we had come in. It was still raining four and a half hours later as we boarded the ferry and headed for the lights of the mainland, where a late supper awaited us both.
Chapter 10—Olivia
For supper that night we had grilled halibut, mussels in tomato-wine broth, and shrimp taco salad with mango pie for dessert. Kim looked more harassed than usual, so I tipped her generously at the end of the meal as Henry stood at the window smoking his pipe and waiting for the rain to die down.
“Sooo,” whispered Kim, with a furtive glance in his direction. “How’s Aragorn?”
How does one even begin to answer that question? “Still brooding and mysterious,” I said. “Even more so the more I get to know him.” For a moment I was lost in contemplation, watching a woman eat alone in a corner of the room just as I had done for so long.
“Did you give any more thought to what I said earlier?”
She wasn’t going to let it go, was she? “You know, I think you may have actually had a point,” I said. “But at the same time, I’m surprised by the amount of good I see in him. He truly is one of the more complicated men I’ve ever met.”
“When I look at him,” said Kim, “all I see are red flags. I’m worried that you can’t see them because you’re wearing rose-colored glasses.”
“Kim, I’ll be honest with you,” I said calmly. There was no longer any trace of anger in my voice. During the course of the day I had become resigned to this mad world. “He’s not a perfect guy. But I’ve never met anyone who was so transparent about who he was. He hides nothing. With him, what you see is what you get. And some of it worries me, and some of it could probably be solved with a bit of soap and a place to stay, but when I look at him, I feel hope. He may not be where he needs to be, but he’s on the way there. And that’s all I care about.”
It was odd: if I had insisted on angrily continuing our quarrel from that morning, Kim would have had much to say. As it was, my cautious and measured defense of Henry left her silent and thoughtful. Instead of preparing her next speech, she really seemed to be listening.
“That reminds me,” I said, “did I get any mail today?”
Kim shook her head as she piled plates onto both arms. “No, but Mr. Man came looking for you—what’s-his-face, the scoundrel.”
“Devin? My boss?”
She nodded grimly. “That’s the one. He didn’t look very happy. He ordered three beers, a plate of oysters, crackers and a soft-shell crab and sat up there at the bar complaining about how you hadn’t come in to work today. He said he was seriously thinking about firing you, which is a shame because ‘Liv was the only thing worth looking at on this damned rock.’”
“He told you all that?”
“I don’t think he knows we’re friends.”
“He’s just looking for an excuse to fire me,” I said, throwing a look of annoyance at the corner where the old man from a few nights ago was playing “Friends in Low Places” on the juke box. “He’s slowly talking himself into it. Give him enough beers and he’ll convince himself it was entirely my fault and he had no other choice.”
“In fairness,” said Kim, “you did skip work without explanation.”
I glared at her.
“He won’t let you go if he can help it, though,” she went on, not paying me any mind. “He’s scared to death of losing his funding, he has to dig up something, and soon, or he’ll lose the confidence of his investors, and frankly he can’t afford to lose you. I wouldn’t be surprised if he just started planting fake relics all over the island to keep the guys holding the purse-strings at bay.”
“In that case,” I said, “the sooner I leave, the better.”
After dessert I coaxed Henry into coming upstairs to my room (“Caves don’t really suit you,” I said, “and you’ll be better off staying in a place with soap and shampoo”). On the way up the stairs he asked me about my conversation with Kim and I filled him in on the parts that didn’t pertain to him.
“It sounds like he’s just looking for an excuse to fire you,” said Henry.
“I know! But I think if I can just talk to him and convince him that what I’ve been doing is important, that it’s for the good of our expedition, I can get him to see reason.”
“Is Kim warming up to me yet?” he said. Nothing slipped by him.
“It’s happening,” I said. “Slowly. After the speech I made tonight, I suspect she’ll give you your own room in a couple of days. For free!”
* * *
“No, you cannot!” Devin shouted on the following morning. “You absolutely cannot go traipsing around on the island all by yourself because you feel so
me mystical force, or whatever, is guiding you to the heart of the island.”
“That’s not what I’m saying—”
“I don’t even want to talk about it. You came here for one thing and one thing only, and that was to help me dig. We have rules. We are an actual profession, of professionals, in case you’d forgotten. And here you are, wandering around like Nancy Drew, about to get yourself kidnapped or murdered because you just couldn’t refuse the call to adventure. Well, I’ve had enough. You can either do things the professional way, or you can find yourself a new job.”
“But if you would just give me a chance—”
“This discussion is over,” he said, pulling off his glasses and rubbing them with the cuffs of his shirt. “You’re here to dig up artifacts, not live out your personal Jules Verne fantasy.”
